USELESS
The battle lines are forming.
You’re standing on the prow of an ocean
liner cutting through the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A huge iceberg
looms dead ahead. You’ve seen it for some time, but now it’s too close, and the
liner too big and fast, to avoid the collision. You quietly make your way to
the lifeboats, knowing they’re the only chance for saving yourself and your
loved ones. Below decks, an orchestra plays a waltz and oblivious revelers
dance.
Most people don’t foresee the world’s
inevitable collision with the iceberg of unsustainable fantasy. When it
happens, they’ll respond predictably, with panic and cowardice. Those who’ve
seen it coming and moved to the lifeboats will experience their own roiling
emotions, attenuated by recognition of the logic behind the disaster. While the
forewarned have dreaded impact, many will also welcome it, in the way one
welcomes an unpleasant medical procedure: let’s get it over with. The motive is
not malice, but conviction born of experience that actions have
consequences and there’s no escaping them. After seemingly inexplicable and
interminable delay, consequences shall arrive, amplified by the tawdry
stratagems that promoted delay.
It will come as a surprise to many, but
governments cannot suspend reality. Their arsenal, when things break down,
comes down to their arsenal: the capacity to coerce. Violence or its threat
enables governments to exact compliance. Proponents of government power
invariably see themselves exercising it. Once the ship hits the iceberg, it
will be obvious that governments’ guns are not wands, freeing citizens from the
necessity of producing as much or more than they consume. They cannot compel
innovators to innovate or producers to produce. While coercive power comes from
one end of a gun, none of the powers that produce progress (and the gun)
magically materialize at the other end.
It is said that America is a society
divided. True enough, but the important question is: along what lines? Crisis
and social breakdown will provide clarification: it’s governments and their
beneficiaries versus producers. In other words, those who don’t do useful
things versus those who do.
Huge shifts in social mood and direction
are presaged. President Trump’s election presages the coming division. Among
the analyses of the election, few noted an obvious dividing line. Trump’s
supporters by and large do useful things, or are angry because they’re
prevented from doing useful things. They build, engineer, manufacture, plant,
grow, operate, maintain, repair, transport, and sell the things we find useful
or essential. When we ram the iceberg, their skills, brains, and adaptability
will be sorely needed.
Politicians and bureaucrats and the
millions dependent on them for their fake jobs, income, food, shelter,
transportation, and medical care will find little demand for their skills, such
as they are. The useful may well conclude that keeping them alive is more
trouble than it’s worth. There will be those who are too young, old, or infirm
to produce, but whom the useful will support out of friendship or kinship.
However, it would be surprising if they felt anything but contempt for the
faceless hordes demanding that someone, anyone, take care of them.
Take away the undeserved from the
undeserving and you get a tantrum. Steal the earned from those who earned it
and you get righteous rage. One’s a firecracker, the other a volcano. The game
has been to impress upon the useful a moral obligation to support the useless,
but the volcano’s about to blow, burying that obscene morality in lava and ash.
Given the staggering levels of accumulated debt and promises, the useful know
their talents, skills, hard work, productivity and futures have been mortgaged
for the useless. This is the salient and intractable social division. No
reconciliation is possible between the useful and those who believe themselves
entitled to their enslavement. The Trump fissure will become a yawning chasm
when the Good Ship Profligate Government collides with the iceberg.
Centralization serves the needs of
government and its dependents. Honest production and exchange require little
government, perhaps none at all. Those who believe current arrangements should
persist have to believe that the useful who support those arrangements will
provide more and more while receiving less and less. The implicit premise has
to be that when it all finally breaks down, the useful can be brutally
subjugated—but kept producing—while receiving nothing more than their subsistence.
Slavery cannot support the police state necessary to impose it, much less a
modern economy. Those who believe any outcomes other than destruction and death
are possible are delusional. If those are the outcomes they anticipate and
desire, they’re homicidally and suicidally psychopathic.
Governments will have their surveillance
apparatuses, police, militaries, prisons, torture chambers, concentration
camps, killing fields, and the like. The useful will have their minds.
Totalitarian accounting is daunting. All that money going out for suppression,
so little coming in from a populace whose best and brightest have been
imprisoned or murdered, or who produce the minimum necessary to survive. The
day comes when the policeman, soldiers, and guards can’t be paid with anything
of value and all hell breaks loose. Or, less colloquially, centralization gives
way to decentralization.
To what depths governments will descend and
how long they will survive as agents of repression is unknowable, but their
dissolution is foreordained. They cannot commandeer the resources necessary to
sustain the current level of tyranny. The useful will vote with their feet and
if that’s not possible, bullets will be their ballots. They will establish
enclaves and protect themselves from the tantrums, chaos, and depredations of
the useless. (Useful in such a context may require nothing more than a
willingness to work hard.) The useless depend on the useful, who of course
don’t need them at all. The useful will eventually triumph, if the species
survives (not a sure thing). Tragically, the butcher’s bill is likely to be
exorbitant.
Originally published by Straight Line Logic.